For Parents

Guarding Sabbath Rest for Children ^{0}

Continuing on the Sabbath Rest & Business theme I read another pretty fantastic post entitled How to Guard Sabbath For Your Children. You can read the entire post and you should at that link, but I wanted to share with you the list of questions to ask when evaluating which activities we pursue for our children to be involved in.

1. Does it sabotage weekend downtime or worship?
2. Does it sabotage family dinners?
3. Does it sabotage bedtime?
4. Does it pull our family apart or push us together?
5. Is it an activity my child can enjoy/benefit from into adulthood?
6. Can we afford it?

Hope this gives you some parenting wisdom as you consider what activities/sports to include your children in.

By futuregrace Category: Feature, For Parents

Too Busy? Read This. ^{0}

Kevin DeYoung writes some fantastic books in Just Do Something, The Hole in Our Holiness and Why We Love the Church. He also writes some great blog post that are free to read and written using a great many less words. Recently he wrote three post called Three Dangers on Being Crazy Busy. I found them very helpful and thought I would recommend them to you as well since just about everyone I talk to both students and adults seems to be crazy busy, but expects to not be crazy busy later. Only we all seem to stay crazy busy. So read on…unless your life is just too crazy busy to read it right now.

Below are links to each post and an quotes from it.

Three Dangers of Being Crazy Busy (1 of 3)

The first danger he deals with is that busyness can ruin our joy.

What we don’t realize is that all the while, we’ve been a joyless wretch, snapping like a turtle and as personally engaging as a cat. When busyness goes after joy, it goes after everyone’s joy.

Three Dangers of Being Crazy Busy (2 of 3)

The second threat busyness brings is that it can rob our hearts.

“Busyness kills more Christians than bullets. How many sermons are stripped of their power by lavish dinner preparations and professional football? How many moments of pain are wasted because we never sat still enough to learn from them? How many times of private and family worship have been crowded out by soccer and school projects? We need to guard our hearts. The seed of God’s word won’t grow to fruitfulness without pruning for rest, quiet, and calm.”

Three Dangers of Being Crazy Busy (3 of 3)

The third danger DeYound deals with is that busyness can cover up the rot in our souls.

Busyness does not mean you are a faithful or fruitful Christian. It only means you are busy, just like everyone else. And like everyone else, your joy, your heart, and your soul are in danger. We need the word of God to set us free. We need biblical wisdom to set us straight. What we need is the Great Physician to heal our overscheduled souls.

By futuregrace Category: Feature, For Parents